Monday, April 10, 2006

Monday Evening

I think I post too often on this site. People get used to it and then when I go eighteen hours without putting something up, I get all these e-mails asking if I'm all right, if there's been some disaster, etc. Either that or it's something really bad...like my Internet connection is out.

The connection is fine and I'm all right...but the last four or five days, I've been battling a bad cold that decided that since I was sick, I might as well have one of the worst cases of conjunctivitis my doctor has seen in years. That's not as awful as it sounds because this afternoon, he prescribed what can only be called a "wonder drug"...and five hours after taking it, my eyes are halfway back to normal. He said they'd be 95% healed by tomorrow evening and I think I'm going to beat that timeline. Moral of the story: I should have gone to see him on Friday instead of thinking I could conquer it with over-the-counter drops and eye wash.

Jack Kirby created a comic book character named Darkseid whose eyes emit a kind of red radiation of death. That's how I've felt the last few days...but now it seems to be over.

I'm behind on a script and way behind on e-mail — what are the odds? — so bear with me. And thanks for the messages of concern, partly for my health but mostly for that of my Internet connection. We may soon reach the stage in this world where you can be declared legally dead if you aren't seen in public for seven years or if you go 36 hours without checking your e-mail.

• Posted at 9:33 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Here's another one of those commercials where you can barely believe someone went to the time and expense...but they did. The product is for the Sony Bravia line and I would love to have been in the meeting where someone said, "Hey, I know how to sell our new television sets. Let's go to San Francisco and dump a quarter of a million Super Balls down a hill!" I'm not saying this was a bad idea. I'm just fascinated as to how you get to it. And I suppose I'm wondering how many times someone watches this spot on TV and says to his wife, "Hey, Marion...they dumped 250,000 Super Balls down a street in Frisco. I think I'll buy a Sony Bravia!"

(I've always loved those commercials where they show you vivid colors and beautiful pictures like you'll get if you buy one of their sets. They assume you'll forget that you're seeing those vivid colors and beautiful pictures on the set they want you to replace.)

There are a couple of different versions of this Bravia spot around. This one is two and a half minutes. If you'd like to view it larger on your monitor and with better resolution, go to this page. And if you're interested in what's involved in sending that many bouncey-balls down the boulevard, there's also a "Making of..." documentary that runs a little under seven minutes. At no point in it do they tell you how (or even if) they cleaned them all up.

One other thing before you watch it: It's a marvelous piece of filmmaking but does it really look to you like 250,000 balls? Doesn't look like anywhere near that number to me. They had to have had nets to catch the balls, right? I mean, you don't just leave rubber balls all over the city or let them bounce down into the business district...and there's a limit to how many the crew and the spectators could have carted off. If you catch them, you can use them over and over again, right? I don't see any shot that looks like it had more than a few thousand in it. Why would they have needed a quarter of a million of them? And what did they do with them afterward?

I spend way too much of my life thinking about things like this. Let's go to commercial...

• Posted at 12:17 AM · LINK